Astellas Pharma and Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have entered into a research partnership for the discovery and development of drugs targeting neglected tropical diseases caused by protozoan parasites.
The collaboration will leverage Fragment Evolution (FE) technology that was developed by Astellas using small molecular weight fragments and the technologies gathered by AIST for the construction of bioassay systems.
FE drug designing method comprises three steps such as exploration of fragment hits, clarification of binding patterns of fragment hits and evolution of fragment hits.
Fragment hits, the small compounds used in the FE with an efficiency to interact with target protein, are selected from Astellas' compound library (fragment libraries) using the bioassays and physicochemical analyses in the first step.
Using high throughput x-ray crystallographic analysis, the structural details of the binding of fragment hits to the target proteins will be examined in the second step.
Based on the three-dimensional structural information achieved, combinatorial syntheses of fragment derivatives are performed following the evaluation of their inhibitory activity and binding patterns.
The fragment activity can be improved by repeating the evolution process of the third step.
